by Farley Mowat
There was then nothing for it but to work south along a thundering weather shore, in the hopes of getting into the entrance to the Bras d’Or Lakes—a complex of great saltwater lakes that fills the interior of Cape Breton Island. John kept the helm while I now pumped continuously. When we hauled the patent log I found we had covered a hundred and twenty miles through the water, much of this distance in the wrong direction.
But all things end. As the sun rose, breaking through the scudding clouds, the wind began to fall off. By noon the storm was over. The seas and swell flattened out and I even managed to find time from pumping to cook some food, the first we had tasted since the voyage began. The day brightened and grew warm and at six o’clock that evening we swung around Bird Island and entered the long, smooth, summer-sleeping gut leading into the heart of the great island of Cape Breton. Shortly thereafter we docked at a lobster fisherman’s wharf. After thirty hours of struggle, Happy Adventure had finally been parted from her native land to become a stranger on an alien shore.
Claire and Albert were surprised to see us when the lobster fisherman drove us into North Sydney late that evening. The Carson had had a rough trip as predicted, and Charlie Brown had assured them we would not get out of Port aux Basques for a week at least. But Charlie Brown did not know John Parker as I now knew him. I am not sure I would want to go pleasure cruising with John, but if I ever again have to make a hard passage under dangerous conditions, he is the man I want beside me.
The next day Claire and I and Albert took Happy Adventure on into the lakes, to the calm and gentle little backwater of Baddeck where there was a small shipyard run by the Pinaud family. Here we intended to haul Happy Adventure out, and keep hauling her out, until her leaks were cured once and for all.
She gave no trouble on this passage. She may have been too exhausted, but I think it more likely she was suffering from culture shock. The contrast between her native land and these green and pleasant shores, with their lush and prosperous farms running down to lethargic waters; the summer heat, foglessness and galelessness seemed, taken together, to befuddle her to the point where she was as amiable as a cut cat.
When we entered the picture-book harbour at Baddeck the basin was crowded with gorgeously accoutred yachts, glistening with polished brass and chrome and manned and womaned by gleaming paragons of fashion. Surrounded by all this conspicuous consumption, even Claire and I felt out of place—as for Happy Adventure, the effect must have been shattering. She could not have failed to realize how uncouth and dowdy she appeared in comparison to these floating pleasure palaces and, like any country girl suddenly exposed to the contemptuous stare of high society, she got that sinking feeling.
No sooner did we come alongside the dock than she opened up as if the bottom had fallen out of her. Only prompt action by Fred and Ralph Pinaud, who dashed to the rescue with a battery of electric pumps, prevented her from burying her shame at the bottom of the harbour.
Albert, on the other hand, was not the least bit discountenanced by this new world. He celebrated his arrival by going ashore and jumping a huge, dull-eyed, blue poodle off one of the yachts. In its simple-minded arrogance the poodle thought to dispute passageway with him. Albert did not deign to fight: he just caught the poodle by one floppy ear, swung it with a shake of his massive shoulders, dumped it into the harbour, then went on his way with not a glance behind. By that action he endeared himself to all the boatyard workers, and they made much of him for the remainder of our stay.
The next morning the Pinauds hauled the schooner and four of us spent a full day working on her. As usual we could find no apparent cause for the leakage so we recaulked her, applied sheet lead to the angle between her garbuts and her keel, slathered paint on her, and launched her off.
She immediately began to leak almost as badly as before she was hauled out. This infuriated the Pinaud brothers who yanked her out of the water again. This time six men went over her as with a fine-tooth comb. They found nothing new. In desperation they put in a new set of stopwaters. Then we launched her for the second time.
That evening she lay at the wharf—and she did not leak. This was cause for a celebration—but it was premature. At midnight, as he was about to leave us, Ralph Pinaud casually glanced into my little vessel’s bilges. His roar of rage must have been audible over most of Cape Breton. The bilges were full. The water was already lapping over the engine room floorboards.
We put the electric pumps to work, and went to sleep.
In the morning Ralph came back aboard.
“There’s no use hauling this——-boat again,” he told us. “There is just one hope for her, just one. See that mud bank on the other side of the basin? Yes? Well, you put your engine full astern and you run this something-basket of yours right onto that mud bank as hard as you damn well can!”
“And leave her there? And take a train to Expo?” I asked hopefully.
“No, Sir! You don’t leave her in my basin. When she’s hard aground you keep your engine turning over in reverse. Let her propeller stir up all the mud it can. Stay there for six hours and then we’ll haul you off…and see.”
I was not about to argue with Ralph, who had the look about him of a man close to the end of his tether. Meekly I obeyed instructions. We backed Happy Adventure full tilt on to the mud bank, and there she stayed all day, churning away and gradually oozing herself backward into the soft shoreline like a turtle digging a nest.
Late in the afternoon an incredibly elaborate yacht motored into the basin. She outglittered all the others. Her name (and I am not making this up) was Patrician. Her crew and owner wore sweaters with the name emblazoned across them in gold letters. She came from Ohio, and it was clear from her attitude that she was slumming. As she manoeuvred toward the wharf she came close to us, and her portly owner (one could hardly feel justified in calling him skipper) hailed me and asked in a condescending sort of a way if I wanted a tow.
I said no, thanks. I said that my boat was on the mud because that was where I wanted her to be. I asked him if he had ever heard of Ohio women using mud packs to improve their faces? When he nodded, I explained that it was customary in Nova Scotia to use the same treatment on our boats-to improve their bottoms. And then I suggested he might personally benefit from the same treatment himself. His subsequent landing at the wharf was not the best I have seen, but he may have had something on his mind.
After dinner that evening we pulled Happy Adventure off her muddy couch and brought her back to the wharf. Ralph and Fred stayed with us all that evening, peering into the bilges every few minutes. And, miracle of miracles, she did not leak. Not then, and not that night, and not the next day.
“She sucked the mud right into her,” Ralph explained. “Filled her pores right up with mud. Now she can’t leak no matter how she tries…not until the mud washes out of her, that is. And when it does, well, you better find yourself another mud bank, quick.”
Ralph Pinaud is one of the few true geniuses left upon this earth.
20. Hello Expo!
IT WAS well into August before Happy Adventure was ready to sail. By then we had all had our fill of rich men’s yachts. Not that Baddeck contained nothing else. Something of the curse was taken off the gilded flotilla by the presence of several real boatmen. There was Dr. Paul Sheldon from New York, then in his seventies, who each year sailed his stout old sloop around Newfoundland and even down the Labrador coast. There was Bob Carr, who had built a perfect replica of Capt. Joshua Slocum’s famous Spray, and then sailed her to the West Indies and back. And there was Rory, an Irish gynaecologist, preparing to sail his vessel across the Atlantic in a bid to escape for a few months from women’s woes.
Baddeck was not so bad if you chose the company you kept, but Claire and I were anxiously eyeing the calendar and wondering if this voyage too would abort far short of its intended destination. Time was fast running on, but we were not.
We left Baddeck at noon on the twelfth, and made an unreal passage through t
he misty lochs of Bras d’Or to St. Peters canal. Clear of the canal we swung west through Lennox Passage which separates Isle Madame from Cape Breton Island.
Isle Madame was settled long ago by French-speaking Acadians and is linked to Cape Breton proper by a causeway and an antique swing-bridge. The bridge is operated by horsepower. The horse lives on the Isle Madame side, and he is an Acadian horse. He does not take kindly to the modern world of hurry and flurry.
Paul Sheldon had told me about this horse and warned me not to approach him in an imperious spirit. Be polite to him, Paul said, and be prepared to take your time.
We followed Paul’s advice. Coming abeam of the farm where the horse lived (it lay a mile east of the bridge) we blew three gentle toots on our hand fog-horn, and then anchored while Claire set about preparing lunch. It was a lovely sunny day and we sat and drowsed over a bottle of wine, occasionally glancing up at the distant farm buildings.
The horse was not home when we arrived. He was away at a neighbour’s farm helping with the harvest, but in mid-afternoon he appeared and ambled down toward the bridge. He was half-way there before his human partner, the nominal bridgemaster, appeared from the farmhouse and began to follow after.
At this juncture there came a swelling roar from the eastward and a few minutes later a huge power cruiser thundered into view making about twenty knots. She passed us without slowing down, and her wake not only upset my glass of wine, but my temper too. My verbal broadside in her direction was drowned out by three long raucous blasts from her multiple klaxon horns. She wanted the bridge opened, and she wanted it opened then! She did not slow down and I had rising hopes that she might crash right into-the bridge piers and sink herself, but at the last instant she went hard astern, sending up huge gouts of water and exhaust fumes. With roaring engines she began to back and fill in front of the closed span, obviously furious at being delayed.
Claire had been on the foredeck preparing to haul up our anchor when this behemoth appeared upon the scene.
“Never mind the anchor,” I called to her. “Look at the horse!”
The horse had stopped in his tracks some three hundred yards short of the bridge. With ears canted forward he watched the floating gin palace going into its tantrum for a moment, then he turned sedately about and began walking back toward the farm. He and the bridgemaster passed each other, but as far as I could tell there was no overt communication between them. The man continued toward the bridge while the yacht shattered the quiet day with a second and then a third series of irate klaxon blasts.
She was then charging angrily back and forth parallel to the bridge. She slowed as the bridgemaster leaned over the railing. We were too far away to hear the conversation that ensued, but the bridgemaster gave us the gist of it later on.
“Well, Monsieur, this fellow, he tell me he is le président for some big company. He tell me to open goddamn bridge vite, because he is in big hurry. I listen till he finish then I tell him about my horse. You see, that horse, he does not like the loud noise. When he hear the loud noise he go back to his stable, and he go inside, and he stay there until whoever make that loud noise, he go away. I tell le président I am sorry but that horse he will not come back to open the bridge while that big boat she is in Lennox Passage. I tell him he must go back around outside Isle Madame and, by gar, after he swear some words like I never hear before, that is what he have to do.”
We saw the yacht swing on her heel, open up her engines and come thundering back toward us, but this time I was ready. I kept my glass in my hand and didn’t lose a drop. I caught a glimpse of a meaty-faced chap in a gold-braided cap on the flying bridge, hands clutching the wheel as if he would have liked to rip it right off its mounting and face so crimson that, had I been a heart specialist, I would have taken Happy Adventure in pursuit, with reasonable assurance of getting a job out of it.
When the last echo of the twin engines had died away the horse came out of the barn, looked searchingly up and down the passage, then strolled down to where the bridgemaster was smoking his pipe and admiring the sky. The two of them hitched themselves to a wooden beam that went around and around, and opened the bridge. As we came abeam of the open span we paused to have a little chat. The horse came over to the rail and looked down at us. He and Albert seemed to like each other and I could understand why they should find themselves en rapport. They must be the two most independent-minded animals that I have ever met.
For the next few days the gods were with us. Happy Adventure’s mud pack did its work, and she herself remained remarkably docile. Possibly she had begun to take some pleasure in the novelty of this new world. We passed through the Canso Gut, and entered the curving scimitar of the Northumberland Strait, which separates mainland Nova Scotia from Prince Edward Island. Except for a brief hassle with a line squall that laid the little vessel right over on her side, and all but pitched Claire and Albert overboard, the voyage to Pictou, our next port-of-call, was without notable event.
Pictou was where Jack McClelland joined us and, true to their oath, Claire and Albert immediately went ashore.
I watched them depart with a certain wistfulness, and the secret wish that I could join them. It was not that I had anything against Jack as a shipmate; it was only that I knew he would not be happy until he got himself, and me, and Happy Adventure, into jeopardy.
There was bad weather forecast for that afternoon and I concluded we should wait until next morning to depart. Jack would have none of it.
“Now look,” he said with his usual vehemence, “I can only spare a week to help you get this hulk to Expo. That’s twelve hundred miles in seven days. We’ll sail day and night. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Jack,” I replied meekly.
I went ashore to cast off the moorings, and was accosted by an elderly tug-boat skipper who had been listening intently to our conversation.
“My, my, my,” he said admiringly. “Now ain’t that mate of yorn just full of piss and vinegar?”
We sailed at dusk, making straight up the centre of the Northumberland Strait. It blew a moderate breeze, and there was a good chop and some rough water when we ran into a series of tide rips, but all went reasonably well until, toward dawn, the wind dropped out and was succeeded by a heavy mist. For several hours we steamed on a compass course that should have taken us well clear of any land. But at 0800 hours, while I was below making breakfast, I was electrified by a cry from Jack.
“Land ho! And dead ahead!”
Sure enough, directly ahead of us, seen dimly through the mist, was a low shore and, between us and it, what looked like another tidal rip with waves boiling up and breaking white.
Jack argued that the land must belong to Nova Scotia and that Cape Tormentine must have extended itself out into the middle of the strait during the night. The truth was we were lost. While we discussed the matter I took another look at the “tide rip” and to my horror realized it was not a rip, but a waste of shoal water. A quick check of the chart showed it had to be the infamous Tryon Shoals which lie up against the shores of Prince Edward Island. We were miles off our proper course, and in a fair way to ending our voyage right there and then.
We clawed clear and I set a new course, but not very confidently. Our compass had obviously gone haywire and could no longer be trusted. It seemed to be off about ten degrees and the wonder is that it was not off even more, for when I looked into the compass box I found, nestled against the compass itself, a large steel screwdriver.
I never did discover for certain how it got there. Jack muttered something about having had trouble with the engine throttle, which was mounted next to the compass, during the night. That was as far as he would go in attempting an explanation. Well, let it pass.
During the night Happy Adventure’s Baddeck mud pack had begun to wear perilously thin. So we put in to Borden, Prince Edward Island, and there we found a bank of lovely, sticky, red, island clay upon which the schooner was persuaded to perch her backside for a few hours. W
hen we departed from Borden she was tight again, but as she chuffed slowly westward she left behind her a spoor that spread a sanguinary hue upon the waters. She looked as if she were slowly bleeding to death.
We continued through the strait and next day put in to the Acadian port of Richibucto, New Brunswick, to fill our fuel tanks. From Jack’s point of view this was a bad choice. He is so fantastically allergic to all crustacea, and to lobsters in particular, that close contact with them literally makes him lose his breath, and he breaks out in flaming and intolerably itchy welts all over his body. Richibucto is one of the world’s great lobster ports, and the lobster season was in full flower.
As we lay at the dock the lobster boats began streaming home to harbour. They had had a good day’s fishing. Since we were strangers, and therefore to be treated with traditional Acadian-French hospitability, many of the fishermen tossed gift lobsters in our cockpit as they passed by.
As lobsters flew about us Jack began to wheeze, and to run up and down the decks like a dog kept too long away from a fire hydrant. When the barrage failed-to diminish he began to scratch himself and his face began to crimson. With a low moan he leapt for the dock, climbed up on it, and stood there a moment peering about him as one pursued by unseen devils. There was no refuge for him there. The dock was jammed with lobster trucks, lobster crates, and lobsters in their thousands.
He fled down the dock, trotting urgently past the puzzled fishermen until he reached the beach-but even there he was not safe. He was followed by a small boy offering him a bucket of lobster claws.
Finally he sought sanctuary in a grassy swale a quarter of a mile up the shore, and there he sat, swatting moodily at mosquitoes, until I finished my leisurely chores, stowed our lobsters in a tin toolbox in the engine room, and signalled to him that all was clear.
